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The Internet Slum: is abandoning the Internet the next big thing? (2004)

• haunter 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • mpweiher 2y ago
    "naked apes" are humans. Us. All of us. Not "not yet internet users". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Naked_Ape https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Naked_Ape
    • pyrale 2y ago
      Not exactly. Interpreted charitably, in the context, it could be replaced by "the unwashed masses". The author seems to have harboured the idea that internet was good only back when it was for a select few. I don't know how he reconciled that with his apparent distaste for gated communities.
      • blitzar 2y ago
        > The author seems to have harboured the idea that internet was good only back when it was for a select few. I mean ... not wrong.
        • InsideOutSanta 2y ago
          But the decline is not because "stupid people" started using it. The reason is that more people started using it, which made it of tremendous commercial interest and brought all of the dysfunctions of an unregulated free market.
      • lynx97 2y ago
        Ethernal September is actually a thing, so he isn't that wrong. I get the aversion towards elitism... But those of us who used the Internet in the 90s still know what happened when the "masses" started to flood it.
        • acheron 2y ago
          The original Eternal September was about AOL users getting access to Usenet in 1993. And yet, “people on AOL in 1993” would easily be in, what, the top 5% in quality of Internet users today? Maybe higher? Hell, your “masses” flooding the Internet in the later 90s were still much better than the population now. And here’s this guy writing about how bad things had gotten in 2004. Buckle up, buddy: you ain’t seen nothing yet. Imagine what brave new world the future holds. Never assume things are so bad that they can’t get worse.
      • fc417fc802 2y ago
        Gated communities arbitrarily bar your entry. That is categorically different from having some minimum standard which anyone is welcome to make an attempt at.
  • ricdl 2y ago
    I guess he did end up abandoning the internet afterall
    • cookie_monsta 2y ago
      As shall we all one day
  • wegfawefgawefg 2y ago
    naked ape refers to all humans. you misread it. stop looking to be offended.
    • haunter 2y ago
      Sorry I was too low IQ to understand the reference, my bad
      • robertlagrant 2y ago
        It said "ten billion naked apes". Clearly talking about everyone (in a few years' time).
      • wegfawefgawefg 2y ago
        you naked ape. hahahaha
  • someperson 2y ago
    If everybody is connected to the internet, shouldn't the mean and median IQ be exactly 100?
    • rorytbyrne 2y ago
      He thinks the IQ of white people (North America and Europe) is 100. He’s implying the rest of the world are lower IQ.
      • sshine 2y ago
        [flagged]
        • tptacek 2y ago
          There are no actual studies that provide this kind of country-by-country data on average IQ, only Richard Lynn's fabricated data, which has become folkloric on the Internet.
        • joshuaissac 2y ago
          > And a country like Morocco has an average IQ of around 67. Average! I don't think that this claim is credible. It comes from Lynn & Becker, who also have Nepal's average IQ at 43,[1] which is in the range where someone with that IQ would be considered mentally disabled, with limited capacity for independent life. That cannot be reconciled with the employment rate in Nepal. And according to Lynn & Becker, the average person from Nepal, Liberia and Sierra Leone has an IQ that puts them in that category. 1. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/average-iq-by-country https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/average-i...
          • tptacek 2y ago
            The truth is that no study that would generate these numbers plausibly has ever been conducted. There is no country-by-country, apples-to-apples international IQ test database. IQ tests are a diagnostic measure, so if you're going out into the field looking for lots of test results, you're either drafting off large-scale psychometrics work done in and by wealthy countries, or you're pulling from mental and developmental health institutions where tests were administered to diagnose patients. That's exactly what Lynn did: he has "good" IQ data generated for-purpose by the research communities in developed countries, and just uses IQ data from, essentially, mental health institutions elsewhere. He presents these data sets as apples-apples equivalent. It gets worse: for what should be obvious reasons, there are lots of countries where it isn't easy to get any such data. Lynn doesn't try; instead, his team takes data from neighboring countries and extrapolates.
  • p3rls 2y ago
    Who cares that the whole is getting dumber? I thought that was the entire idea behind the internet? I didn't create it either and my IQ isn't in the 150s-- it got dumber when it let me on, too. The problem with the internet today is that the top (i.e. google) is going along with the bottom, the so-called enshittification. They are promoting the types of people this article is complaining about into direct visibility with its monopoly powers on search and discovery. It's in my niche, of course too. People from India with no connection to the industry and just a wordpress are the #1 query for almost every result for the past ten years. It's nuts. My niche is at the forefront of the enshittification, but soon this will be your niche too. Google basically kills off every consumer webapp like this to promote garbage wordpresses, content from the hindustantimes and other virtual detritus onto your browser. Look at r/SEO, are they focused on creating quality or scamming people? I'll give you a hint, research their mods' SEO websites. Yet Google cannot seem to get enough of it. I think it's far from determined that web4 will be web2 but with more third world-problems but it's not looking great for the people who are building consumer apps right now.
  • pvg 2y ago
    calling the yet not internet users “naked apes” It's almost certainly just a wanky way to say 'human', an allusion to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Naked_Ape https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Naked_Ape
• cookie_monsta 2y ago
  Betteridge's law in full effect
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• chungus 2y ago
  For those not familiar, this post is by John Walker[0] one of the co-founders of Autodesk who made AutoCAD. He passed away last year[1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Walker_(programmer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Walker_(programmer) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39297185 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39297185
  • safety_sandals 2y ago
    Wow, definitely familiar with his work, though haven't used AutoCAD for quite some time. Pretty sure my fingers still remember some of the text commands.
    • kragen 2y ago
      redraw redraw redraw
  • NotYourLawyer 2y ago
    I hadn’t heard that he died, sad.
• pajko 2y ago
  There was not even an AI back then, what would he say now? https://www.forbes.com/sites/chriswestfall/2024/12/18/the-dark-side-of-ai-tracking-the-decline-of-human-cognitive-skills/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/chriswestfall/2024/12/18/the-da... https://phys.org/news/2025-01-ai-linked-eroding-critical-skills.html https://phys.org/news/2025-01-ai-linked-eroding-critical-ski...
• kelseydh 2y ago
  > But I fear the cure may be worse than the disease, so much so that I penned a 25,000 word screed sketching the transformation of the Internet from an open network of peers to a locked-down medium for delivering commercial content to passive consumers. This part he got right, though he was clueless to the power of social media. He also correctly predicted a rapid decline in the intelligence of content on the internet. However he was quite off the mark in predicting that hacking and spam would stop internet use.
  • fzeroracer 2y ago
    Technically he's not wrong about spam, it's just that the classical view of spam is no longer applicable. When you think of the rise of AI-generated content and SEO-focused design, it is almost impossible to use the internet without being inundated by a deluge of low quality spam. Everywhere we go we're served ads for scam products, have to figure out if someone is an actual person or a bot and so forth. And the balkanization of the internet is, essentially, what we're seeing.
    • bsenftner 2y ago
      Do not use ad networks, none of them, they are the source of all this Internet scummery. The spam, the low quality ads for fraud products, and the ads themselves are virus delivery networks. If you really need advertising to support your product, do you really have a product? Or are ya just gossip, er "social media". Social media is just gossip, monetized, what was before recognized as the lowest form of communication now monetized and washed from that dirty name "gossip", now it's "media", "social media"... what fools mass culture is composed.
      • kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
        You also have to block the trackers that feed your behavioral data to the brokers that, in turn, fuels the invasive profiling the advertisers use to bid against.
    • zyx321 2y ago
• wruza 2y ago
  Well I sort of abandoned it now. I visit here and, occasionally, the articles posted here. Also a thin slice of very curated youtube content. And software documentation. And porn. That’s it. Sometimes I accidentally “go out” by following a link with infinite scroll and wonder how people live in all that. It’s not very far from idiocracy and other dystopias, both internet- and socio-wise. Where there’s many people with different views and no established culture, there’s chaos and insanity.
  • anal_reactor 2y ago
    > Sometimes I accidentally “go out” by following a link with infinite scroll and wonder how people live in all that. It’s not very far from idiocracy and other dystopias, both internet- and socio-wise. Most people are stupid, and having the internet available to the masses was a mistake. When accessing the internet required money and knowledge, it was by definition a community of above-average people. At the time it seemed like the internet was enabling the worst part of humanity, but those were actually the good times. Actually, not all people have internet access yet, so buckle up, it's going to get even worse. > You are an elitist Correct.
  • dkjaudyeqooe 2y ago
    I think it's not abandoning the internet, it's abandoning the web, which is arguably the worst and best thing about the internet. Like you, most people want to take the narrow bits of the internet that are useful to them and ignore the rest. Meanwhile the web is trying to make you do the opposite, drawing you in and wasting your time. Over time this will mean leaving the web entirely for new and better interfaces that block out the toxic sludge and return control to the user.
    • derefr 2y ago
      > Meanwhile the web is trying to make you do the opposite, drawing you in and wasting your time. What a bizarre thing to say. It's true, in some sense, but it's still bizarre. Maybe I'm committing a No True Scotsman fallacy, but to me "the web" is, at its core, the thing made of web pages — pieces of human-authored content that very intentionally and manually hyperlink to one another. And these "web pages" themselves are almost always static files — though they could maybe be served by a wiki or CMS backend. But HTML5 web apps that deliver walled-garden social networking experiences? Not "the web", per se. Loosely affiliated with "the web" at best. My rubric for what constitutes "the web": • Does each piece of content have a readable, human-friendly permanent URL, that can 1. be search-engine-indexed and 2. through which the public can access the content, without signing up for the service, or being nagged to sign up for the service? (Remember that? That's the web!) • If you click on hyperlinks in the content, does the page just send you directly to the link destination — implying that the author of the content is the ultimate arbiter of where they want their links to go? (Oh, that's definitely the web!) Or does the page do tracking things? "Warning, you're leaving the platform" things? Embed-unfurling things? "Trying as hard as it can to make you forget there's an outside world" things? (Definitely not the web!) • Does accessing content at its permalink URL deliver server-rendered HTML containing the content — such that anyone with an HTML-parsing library could write an "alternative User Agent" to render that content? (That's the web I know and love!) Or is the page a template/skeleton that gets populated with the content via an XHR? (Not the web at all!) • Are there tags in the preloaded HTML with appropriate fragment identifiers, allowing people to hyperlink to specific relevant parts of the content? (That's extremely "the web.") Under this definition of "the web", there's no real ability for "the web" to do anything like "drawing you in and wasting your time." The worst it can do is to offer you endless opportunities to explore and educate yourself on trivial topics. But of course, under this definition of "the web", there's only so much "web" — and most of it was created before the year 2005! (Other than the online arms of traditional-journalism news websites — many of which carry on putting out real new "web" pages every day.) If you disagree with my definition of "the web" — well, I still think the concept is valuable, so maybe keep the concept but choose your own name for it. (Maybe "the intentional web"? "The artisanal web"?) But I would argue that this is, explicitly, what "the World Wide Web" originally meant, to anyone who lived through the birth and growth of it. That any other, more expansive definition of the term, has been driven by a process of co-option by the very cathedrals to which "the web" functioned as bazaar. That we shouldn't respect this co-option; that we should continue to use "the web" as a reference to that core of good stuff, while considering all the rest of the stuff as "not the web, just using web technologies." (This distinction used to be easy, because all that platform-y not-the-web stuff used to be built using Java/ActiveX applets, or Flash, or Silverlight. Now it's all HTML5... but does that matter? It's still, on a semantic level, not "the web.")
• INTPenis 2y ago
  Yes the internet will become a slum of AI robots and loners. What we need is a government sponsored regulated social media where we identify ourselves with eID, so that anything you do or say is actually tied to your person. Americans won't understand this but many European countries are already primed for it. If you want to go slumming you're free to do so, but I want a stable and safe social media as an alternative.
  • wizzwizz4 2y ago
    > so that anything you do or say is actually tied to your person So, Facebook? "Real-name systems" are all, unequivocally, bad.
    • BoredPositron 2y ago
      The nice thing is you don’t have to participate if you don’t want to.
      • balamatom 2y ago
        Yeah, just like you don't have to own a smartphone if you don't want to.
        • aleph_minus_one 2y ago
          I know quite some people who do by conscious decision not own a smartphone considering these are surveillance bugs with an inbuilt phone function, for which you even have to pay.
          • markhahn 2y ago
            not to be persnickety, but you don't have to pay for cellular service. the trackability you're criticizing is not inherent to the smartphone concept.
            • 2y ago
• valeg 2y ago
  see also: Pandora's Vox: On Community in Cyberspace - https://folksonomy.co/?permalink=2299 https://folksonomy.co/?permalink=2299
  • disqard 2y ago
    Seconding this recommendation! An excerpt from Carmen Hermosillo (humdog): "It is fashionable to suggest that cyberspace is some island of the blessed where people are free to indulge and express their individuality," she wrote. "This is not true. I have seen many people spill out their emotions – their guts – online and I did so myself until I began to see that I had commodified myself."
• dash2 2y ago
  > When I'm feeling down I call it “Internet Gated Communities”, when in an optimistic mood, “The Faculty Club”. This may lead to what many observers refer to as “the Balkanisation of the Internet”—a fragmentation of the “goes everywhere, reaches everybody” vision of the global nervous system into disconnected communities. This may not be such a bad thing. This happened. In the Philippines, for example, almost all online interaction takes place on Facebook. FB isn't a gated community, but it allows people to set up their own gated communities by the services it layers on top of raw http and html. Another word is "walled gardens", and again, walled gardens are popular because unwalled gardens become slums. The point is, libertarians, open standards advocates and "old web" nostalgists need to recognize why these services are popular, if they are going to have a chance of protecting the openness they care about.
  • Grimblewald 2y ago
    Precisely this, old internet was fun and good because it was a defacto walled garden. A very specific group of people had access to the internet. Want to bring that magic back? recreate that crowd / demographic. It is really that simple. The internet, once truly connecting everyone, was always just going to mirror the physical human world, because why would it not?
  • lurk2 2y ago
    Facebook is a walled garden; it requires you to sign up before viewing most content. Quora, Instagram, and Pinterest are the same way. > Another word is "walled gardens", and again, walled gardens are popular because unwalled gardens become slums. Gardens are not walled off for the benefit of the users; they are instead walled off to benefit the network’s owners. There are three chief factors motivating owners to walk in their networks: Preventing rivals from scraping content or user data, encouraging users to sign up so that their activity can be monetized, and keeping content platform exclusive (most platforms will penalize content that has a competing platform’s watermarks on it).
    • dash2 2y ago
      > Gardens are not walled off for the benefit of the users; they are instead walled off to benefit the network’s owners. This is true, but the implication that therefore there are no benefits for the users is false. If Facebook was worse than the web for users, they'd flock to the web. (At this point, usually some implicit argument is made that users are foolish and misguided. I'd urge you not to go down that route.)
• aucisson_masque 2y ago
  Abandoning is not the answer. I see the effect with my father, he never got much into it in the first place and now he is completely lost when he need to order stuff. So many scammy website featuring first in Google result thanks to seo optimisation or just advertisement. Then he is completely oblivious to the fact that people can make deepfake video and believed one to be true when it was shown to him on someone else phone. As much garbage there can be on the internet, you have to force yourself to keep up with it and overall technology otherwise you're just left behind at the mercy of those who adapted.
  • donatj 2y ago
    Some may even be oblivious to the fact that the article is from 2004 ;) Deepfakes weren't even a fever dream yet.
    • unyttigfjelltol 2y ago
      Spam exploded in 2003[1] to the modern experience of it. Before that, spam was somewhat infrequent, even without countermeasures. I recall in the 2001 time period being so annoyed by each individual spam note that I would respond to the appropriate "abuse@" email. By 2004, it was a torrent and totally impractical, and I don't think it was because of my own notes to administrators. [1] https://www.emailtray.com/blog/email-spam-trends-2001-2012/ https://www.emailtray.com/blog/email-spam-trends-2001-2012/
      • blitzar 2y ago
        When Gmail launched on April 1, 2004, there were two big selling points for me - storage and spam.
        • Diederich 2y ago
          ...and search. That was amazing.
          • 2y ago
• aaron695 2y ago
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• hotpepperishot 2y ago
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• yazantapuz 2y ago
  If for internet we think of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and the like...then YES.
• johntitorjr 2y ago
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• deleted 2y ago
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• api 2y ago
  The Internet is BGP, IP, and the like. Systems that run on the Internet come and go: the open web, the siloed web, social media, private overlay networks, etc. All of those still exist but there's definitely been a progression of the ages in which these things have been dominant and then faded into the background. I'm sure this will keep happening. I don't think the Internet is going anywhere.
  • nullpoint420 2y ago
    Let’s not pretend it’s easy to become a BGP peer as an individual.
    • api 2y ago
      Very much not what I meant. I meant the system that carries packets is the Internet, not the services and protocols that run on top. Stuff above L3 comes and goes.
• NickC25 2y ago
  I haven't abandoned it at all, but I do try to regulate my internet time. I use it to read articles, trade equities, play chess, communicate with colleagues, and do market research for my company. Of course, I engage with a few communities, particularly HN and a few private Slack / Discord groups that align with my company. I also try to get out a lot, touch grass, read physical books, and exercise. I try to avoid bringing my phone with me to places where I won't need it, such as to the gym or to the running track. The crux is that we've completely surrendered ourselves to social media.
  • fibonachos 2y ago
    This is basically where I’m at. It’s mostly become a utility.
• safety_sandals 2y ago
  I already did. I don't use the Internet anymore.
  • avgDev 2y ago
    Hello stranger, nice to see you on the interwebz.
  • AnimalMuppet 2y ago
    I'm curious about how you posted here, then...
    • scottLobster 2y ago
      My dad used to be a Professor at a major State university, and he talked about how one of his older colleagues, who was a professor of Electrical Engineering, had his secretary (yes, he had a secretary) print out his emails for him every morning and put them in his physical inbox. He'd read them, type up his responses, print them out, and have her transcribe and send the responses later in the day. Just sad really.
      • piotrpdev 2y ago
        I'm confused, did he type them up on a computer that was not connected to the internet/school network but was physically connected to a printer close by? Why didn't he and the secretary copy emails from/to some form of portable storage?
        • vvchvb 2y ago
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        • doubled112 2y ago
          One time I had a client print an email, write on it, and fax it back. Don’t try to understand the work flow. That’s impossible. Just try to realize the truth.
        • 2y ago
• rchaud 2y ago
  > "As a venture capitalist who invests in high tech, I have to worry that the web will be perceived as an increasingly corrupt police state overlying a maze of dark alleys and unsafe practices outside the rule of law." I wonder how much of VC thinking skewed this way, encouraging Facebook and others to try and become AOL-like walled gardens, and eventually lobbying governments to make exceptions for them.
• curtisszmania 2y ago
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• Slava_Propanei 2y ago
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• 0x20cowboy 2y ago
  Back in the day, the internet was an escape from the TV. It allowed access to information, alternative views (real ones not insane made up ones), no ads, and an escape from having to hear a dominant narrative. Now the internet has become the new TV. A lot of younger people I see are shunning it. That makes my old hacker heart smile.
  • MarcelOlsz 2y ago
    There is a notable vibe shift from when I showed a date my plex setup 5 years ago to now. Awhile back it was ick-inducing, now it's cool again to own your data / not pay for crap.
    • __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
      Ideally it will look from the outside like people are abandoning the internet when really what they're abandoning is the web (that's the sick part anyhow) and moving the rest of their digital lives into a vpn-mediated sub-internet made of the participation of people that each user knows via face-to-face interactions.
    • donatj 2y ago
      When normies started asking me how to set up their own Plex, I knew something had shifted.
    • kouru225 2y ago
      Anecdotal, but I’ve met like 3 or 4 new plex people in the last year. They’re all just starting out.
      • Carrok 2y ago
        You should encourage them to move to Jellyfin. It's better, and actually free.
        • MarcelOlsz 2y ago
          Better how? Lots of seedbox provides still don't offer Jellyfin.
• imoreno 2y ago
  You don't need to abandon "the Internet". Maybe we could improve on the TCP/IP stack or the ISP model but it's hardly a priority. What we need is to abandon the web and start a divergent platform. It's not your average Chrome-with-no-adblock user that's ruining the web. It's the "slumlords" if you will. For those slumlords it's all about the money and they've already invested into building a slum on the web. They already have all the users on that platform. They're happy to milk them. They don't care about capturing profit from techies - if they did, we would see companies do a much better job of providing hacker-friendly services. If the hackers all move to some other platform where they don't have ads, trackers or JS bloat the slumlords will ignore it like they ignored the internet in the 80s and 90s. Only if there is potential to bring the non-technical users in droves on that platform will they care, but those users already have the current Web, so why would they bother? Unfortunately so far it seems like everybody wants to try their own take on the "next" platform. Experimentation and diversity of opinion is great and all, but ultimately we can't leave the slum until everyone agrees on one place to go instead. Best I can think of is Gemini that has some traction, but in its current form I doubt it will succeed - the creators put too much of their idiosyncrasies into it.
• 6510 2y ago
  A group of humans (with all kinds represented) blurs out all refined qualities almost by definition. Eventually some of them (of more similar thought) will leave for greener pastures. Perhaps naively so as it involves a lot of work or perhaps working on something together brings people together. If these few heretics succeed others will follow until the new place truly becomes as wonderful as imagined. More and more will follow, even people who don't want to be there will show up until eventually everything blurs out again and the process continues. Besides the new place where interesting people gather there is the old place left behind where the interesting is undesired or made illegal. Meanwhile they also want to bring back the old days. There are countless examples of this process from IRC and the USA to TV and Facebook. The Moon and Mars colony will also start out stupid then turn into something wonderful... for a while :) This will be the only thing I write on the internet today eventho I shouldn't bother. The point use to be to get some useful intelligent response to refine or correct my perspective. Solving world hunger costs only 35 billion per year. It's a great bench mark. If the internet is the sum of human knowledge we must be short of something else. Apparently we can type text into inputareas ad infinitum without accomplishing even this simple, cheap and easy goal. What a bunch of losers we are :)
• jmholla 2y ago
  @dang, it's small, but there's a spelling error in the title. Intenet -> Internet
  • Etheryte 2y ago
    HN doesn't support tagging users, if something is off, you can use the flag button or send an email.
• starluz 2y ago
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• deleted 2y ago
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• Beijinger 2y ago
  Bots now make most internet traffic. I wonder how many Reddit stories are written by bots. Answered by bots. Interesting to read, don't get me wrong. This is why worldcoin may have a bright future: https://world.org/world-id https://world.org/world-id I think we are moving to gated communities again. The internet will split into several parts. Microsoft always wanted the internet to be a Microsoft thing. So maybe we move into this direction.
• chairmansteve 2y ago
  The internet is the new daytime TV.
• heavymetalpoizn 2y ago
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• bentt 2y ago
  That's like saying you should abandon the Earth. There's a multitude of ways to be a part of and use The Internet. Then again, there are those that believe Mars is the only answer.